A mutual break-up with privacy

I used to be pretty intensely private about my life, at least when it came to sharing online. That started to change for me when I met Twitter, and slowly and tentatively started putting a little more of myself in the public eye with each tweet.

I’ve been exploring the new Timeline view in Facebook, and I love it.

I did, however, have a peek at what the ‘public’ sees when they visit my profile. Turns out a lot, despite my tight settings. Typical. I suppose this is the way things are going.

There’s a war on privacy here, and I’m giving up the fight. And I’m going to try to do it amicably.

Instead of fretting every time Facebook purportedly changes their layout and along with it, your sharing settings, I’m making my profile pretty much public to the world, and, as I would always be anyway, being mindful of what I post.

There’s not really much here any more that I wouldn’t have posted on Twitter anyway, and I realise that anything posted with even the most privacy settings is never guaranteed to stay that way.

This goes hand in hand with my more open ‘friending’ policy I’ve adopted over the last couple of years, as well as the increasing blending of my personal and professional lives.

I’ve made this point before: If I get turned down for a job, or turn off a potential partner because of something I’ve posted in the past, I probably am better off without that company or person.

It helps that I work and live in the tech world (as opposed to law or finance, where this kind of attitude is generally looked down upon), where my colleagues, peers and dates tend to live just as publicly as me, if not more.

In exchange for my private data over the years, I’ve had access to the fantastic services rendered by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, including not only a massive suite of tools to manage myself, my data, and my relationships, but also the creation of a digital experience that’s moulded to me.

I’ve gotten strange looks when I’ve said this in the past, but I like highly targeted ads. I’ve always liked advertising in general, but I love when an ad speaks to me, reminds me to do or buy something I probably had an interest in anyway, and allows me to interact with it.

So no, I don’t worry about my privacy, and I’m happy that we’re parting ways maturely and on such good terms.

But what do I worry about?

I worry about building a filter bubble I’ll never be able to see beyond, or scarily, realise that I’m even in. I like that my digital life is relevant to me, but I don’t want to be left ignorant of important events, news or knowledge just because some algorithms determine it’s not the type of thing I’d click on.

I hope to see a rebellion here, a series of services I can hook my existing digital self into that will help me explore the world outside my bubble without getting drowned in information.

More than anything, I worry about not owning any of this data. I realised the other day that my Facebook profile is among my most prized possessions – my contacts, my history, everything I’ve said and all of these cherished messages from friends for the last few years – and it’s something I don’t even own. In a snap, all of that history and information could be taken away, and I would be rendered heartbroken, as if someone had burned boxes full of my photo albums, diaries, and little black books.

Unlike other aspects of this greater issue of privacy, this data ownership is something that I can at least do a little something about. I’m going to be making an effort to publish more to here and push to my networks rather than the other way around. Now that my networks are essentially open to the world, I’m going to treat them like subscription channels into various aspects of my life, all fed from a central repository of all of the stuff I create online.

I look forward to being a whole lot more open with the world. As many of you already know, it states on my personal business card: Follow me, friend me, call me.

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There Are 6 Comments

Some stated Zuckenberg is of a generation that never had anything to hide, you can say you are a communist, a racist or a radical left wing activist and most of your friends would just yawn. In the 60s you would have lost your job for such statements and in many countries you would still end up in jail. So perhaps it’s a weird kind of luxury not to care about your privacy 🙂

Another man once said, that everyone who claims that they have notting to hide, should feel sad about being so mainstream that no-one cares about their deepest secrets 🙂

Concluding, celebrate that you can share anything you like without losing friends or freedom and secretly work on plans too strange to share.

I think you’re right with that – we’ve got nothing to hide, and nothing to be afraid of. At worst, I realise my data will be used to creepily target me (more posts to come on my limits here 😉 ), but I’ve never had a fear of prosecution or exclusion in my life.

We are indeed lucky.

Let’s grab a coffee sometime and discuss in private the strangeness of our plans 🙂

This might be an odd question, but I notice you make a distinction of a digital experience, do you feel that same about the real / analogue world?

I feel that the the digital / online world can greatly enhance the real world, but keeping somethings private / unmentioned online can lead to better interactions offline or to more delightful discoveries. Also it’s your life so it shouldn’t be owned by a faceless organisation or government. But the timeline is a nice feature, it can resurface forgotten feelings/ memories.

In relation to targeted ads, sometimes the filtering can be good, and maybe they will be able to cater for changing tastes as we get older. Apparently some foods get more appealing when we reach over 30.

(I need to create a proper blog as it would allow for more reasoned/ researched replies 🙂 )

I tend to flip from caring and not caring about my online privacy day after day.But lately, like you, I’m raising a white flag. Net/net, I agree with Scott McNeally. We have 0 privacy. In a day and age when everything and anything is ‘on net’, and that being ‘off grid’ is a cool cyberpunk nirvana, the issue of online privacy is almost moot (save prevention from hacking/cloning, and all malevolent abuse of online privacy).

Just be careful what you post, check those settings, make sure you’re not spammy as your social network tools become more powerful, and most of all, use your common sense.

We are all growing our online personas. Increasingly, these personas are not virtual fictitious extensions of ourselves,but cored into our real personalities… which span both our professional and personal lives. This is who we are. Take it, or leave it. And take no prisoners :).

I love what you said about potential employers; so true. If they can’t hack you, then you’re better off without them.

Bang on in so many respects. Particularly resonant for me, your view of “if an employer doesn’t like what I post, I’m better off without them”. Couldn’t agree more. Ownership / recovery of personal data is absolutely key though. It’s why I started my blog (I was leaving lengthy comments all over town and wanted to focus a little and have the ability to explore on my own terms) – and one of the things I love about Ifttt – if someone tags me in a photo on Facebook, I have it auto-download to Dropbox. It’s maybe not a perfect solution, but it’s better than total reliance on one. Write more. Please.

This is a risk decision. For where you are at in your life, it’s probably the right one, since the risks are outweighed by the rewards of additional social connectivity and a lower mental tax of trying to figure out who will see what. My feelings mirror yours in many ways and I’ve dealt with it in the same manner, by just being more careful about what I post; I assume that everything that I put on Facebook will be (or could be) public.

I will say that as your life situation changes, your risk tolerance will change with it. For instance if/when you start a family and you are funding college educations and your cashflow situation becomes more precarious with mouths to feed, I have found that I start putting my online postings through a filter. Not my old filter of “if a potential employer is turned off by this they’re obviously not for me,” but a new filter of “who am I turning off and what revenue and relationships am a prematurely cutting off by saying this?”

What I wonder is that for the younger generation, as they get older and their filter starts to evolve, how do you control information that was previously posted using the old, more open filter? Because on the Internet, everything is archived five times over…